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Bill Gates Says There Is Something Perverse In College Ratings

There is a perverse metric rating system for U.S. colleges, says Bill Gates, the world’s most generous and influential philanthropist. The problem is that it gives credit to schools that attract the best students rather than schools that take poorly prepared students and help them get ready for the next stage.

“There is no feedback loop in rating colleges,” Gates explained at a small roundtable of six bloggers and journalists held on Wednesday at the Omni Berkshire Place hotel in New York City, “The control metric shouldn’t be that kids aren’t so qualified. It should be whether colleges are doing their job to teach them. I bet there are community colleges and other colleges that do a good job in that area, but US News & World Report rankings pushes you away from that.”

A college dropout himself, Gates is still a big fan of higher education, though worried about soaring costs and the lack of funding of R&D in education overall. “College is perfectly designed for me. I’ve watched more MIT OpenCourseWare than anyone I know. I love taking college courses, love hanging out at college. I didn’t leave college because it wasn’t suited to me. I left college because I thought I had to move quickly on the Microsoft opportunity. I had already finished three years and if I had used my AP credits properly I would have graduated,” recalled Gates, “I am as fake a dropout as you can get.”

Co-chair of the $36.2 billion (endowment) Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, he made these comments and observations about the country’s flawed college ratings as part of a discussion of his just released fifth annual foundation letter, which is dedicated to measuring the effectiveness of various nonprofit initiatives around the world. “In the past year I have been struck again and again by how important measurement is to improving the human condition,” he stated.

Gates is trying to address some of these issues through his foundation’s Post Secondary Strategy and says measurements he’d like to see in place include ratings of colleges that look at effectiveness of preparing low-income students as well as ratings of teachers colleges.

While that is very much still in its early stages, he’s farther along in the area of K-12 education where he’s been exploring the best approaches to measuring teachers’ effectiveness and improving performance for several years. “Five years ago the debate was whether you should measure teachers at all,” Gates said, “Amazingly that question hardly exists now. Even the NEA (National Education Association) would agree.”

Thirty three states have laws to measure teacher performance though most rely on test based systems in large part because they are cheaper. “We’re huge believers that if you want teachers to be better, test scores are simply not the way to do it,” Gates noted, “Tests play a role but the reason we downplay them is because it’s not diagnostic of what’s wrong.”

Starting in 2009, the Gates Foundation supported a project known as the Measure of Effective Teaching, or MET, which worked with 3,000 teachers to come up an evaluation and feedback system that helped teachers improve. “The report concluded that there were observable, repeatable and verifiable ways of measuring teacher effectiveness,” wrote Gates in the letter. Anonymous student surveys that asked such questions as “Does your teacher use class time well, get class organized quickly, help you when you are confused – were proven to provide useful feedback as were reports from trained professionals observing teachers at work.

One of those observers, Mary Ann Stavney, a high school “Master Teacher” profiled in the annual letter, spends 70% of her time observing other teachers, meeting with them and providing input. The problem, of course, is that this kind of measuring, particularly the hands-on observation in classrooms, is costly, adding about 2% onto payroll.

That is one reason that implementing such techniques across the nation’s public schools will be a tough sell. Still don’t count anything out, as long as Gates is willing to commit his time and vast resources.

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I found the commentary from Gates refreshing – even a bit idealistic. The problem is more people need to think along these lines with regard to education. I recently read an interesting piece from Brian Kibby, President of McGraw-Hill Higher Education, which offered some astute insights and observations: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/brian-kibby/higher-education-predictions_b_2553114.html

Windward hosted a challenge for computer science majors throughout the world. Well known schools (Princeton & Columbia) competed against lesser known schools (Colorado State and Hendrix College) in the Windward Code Wars.

If the ratings of computer science departments were based on such contests, to include the ICPC and ImagineCup, suddenly problem solving, collaborating AND computer programming knowledge, would provide a more rounded view of how these students would fit within a firm and how well their academic institutions prepared them to go from theory to practice.

The Walmart heirs are collectively worth $100billion. It is time for them to make a large philanthropic gesture. My hope is that they will set up a manufacturing research institute to develop manufacturing techniques, equipment and skills, to make manufacturing more efficient and to bring manufacturing back to the U.S. I ask this of them because Walmart bears responsibility for shipping manufacturing to China and developing manufacturing in China in order to increase their US profit margins.

Bill’s critique–that colleges drawing the smartest students get the highest ratings–also goes for the various high school rankings. Well-off parents flock to the nicest suburbs “for the schools,” but often find the schools are mediocre. No one talks about that, of course, since that would hit property values. So they quietly sign their kids up for Kumon, or Huntington or Sylvan learning centers, or hire private tutors, and use the schools largely for socialization, sports, baby-sitting, etc. Everyone keeps the dirty little secret of the suburbs to themselves. In N.J., when Gov. Chris Christie promised to improve the schools when he took over in 2010, he pointedly included the so-called “good” schools in the suburbs in his plan. He quickly learned, however, that suburban, often Republican voters (his base) wanted no part of any discussion that hinted that the schools in their town–where they probably paid seven figures for their homes–were anything less than the best in the world. He’s not talking about improving suburban schools any more.

Max–aim your vitriol at the federal government. Forbes and many other publications have done many stories showing how the vast amounts of money that Washington hands over to college students goes directly to fueling the vast increases in college tuition. It’s just common sense: if the govt hands a student a $20,000 loan for tuition, the college will always find a way to capture that money and raise tuition by $20,000. The student is left no better off while the college becomes more and more bloated. Here’s one look we did on this: http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2007/1112/144.html

With regard to the 2 percent payroll increase, what if an age-appropriate financial literacy program integrated into k thru 12 curiculum acteing as the mechanism for monitoring? This would certainly be a step in the right direction of solving a number of issues, i.e., whether children are getting the building blocks, further identify where programs need tweaking, better preparing children for adulthood, and expanding on a well-rounded educated workforce.

Perhaps if people were not so willing to pay these outrageous tuition rates, the colleges could not charge so much. With parents and teachers and employers all pushing for the younger generation to be further educated, and the fact that people listen to them, it makes it very hard to not get an education and still be competitive in an employer’s eyes. How do you stop an entire nation from being willing to pay the price for education? That seems to be a solution to the problem, but it’s just not possible. Not with the way people think. Guess we have to let big shots like Mr. Gates solve these issues. Those stubborn people will listen if they smell money. That seems to be how it works.